Can World War II film long hidden by the Army aid today’s veterans?

Can World War II film long hidden by the Army aid today’s veterans?

By Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

“The guns are quiet now,” is the first line in John Huston’s 1946 short film, “Let There Be Light,” which focuses on World War II veterans dealing with what we’d today call post-traumatic stress disorder.

Quiet, perhaps. But the echoes of those guns were still ringing in the minds of many returning soldiers — much as they still are with modern veterans.

Huston, himself a veteran and director of such films as “The Maltese Falcon” and “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” filmed soldiers being treated at Long Island’s Mason General Hospital for what at the time was called shellshock.

Some soldiers in the film suffered visible tics, shook uncontrollably, stuttered badly, and in worse cases, couldn’t walk or talk due to their wartime experience. Others appeared fine externally, but were battling nightmares, memories of combat, and other issues.

One man breaks down simply while trying to tell a psychiatrist about a photograph of his sweetheart, another says that after seeing so many friends die, he made the assumption he was next.

The hour-long documentary, with brief narration by Huston’s father, Oscar-winner Walter Huston, was a revelation for its time, for its unprecedented film techniques as well as its content.  It uses unscripted footage of doctors treating patients – unheard of for such films at the time — and is shot and lit like a major Hollywood movie. It also broke ground by showing both black and white soldiers freely mixing at the hospital, sharing both group therapy sessions and playing sports together.

It's believed that a mix of those reasons was what led the Army to all but suppress the film until 1980, when it released a poorly edited version, with some dialogue completely inaudible.

"We don't know what combination it was that (the Army) didn't like," said Annette Melville, director of the National Film Preservation Foundation, which funded the film's restoration.

Not only was the film suppressed, but in 1947, the Army released "Shades of Gray," a film that's essentially a remake of Huston's work, even lifting dialogue from "Let There Be Light" and putting it into the mouths of actors -- all of them white.

A fully restored version of Huston's original film is available for free online viewing for three months on the National Film Preservation Foundation's website. And in a time when modern veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are dealing with similiar issues, many believe that the 65-year-old footage can still be relevant.

"If you listen to the dialogue, it could have been recorded yesterday," Melville told msnbc.com. She hopes that younger veterans will find something to relate to in the film, and says that that interested viewers can not only watch it online, but download the entire film and add it to their own websites, as the footage is in the public domain.

While mental-health issues involving veterans have been much in the news in recent years, Ron Honberg, director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told msnbc.com that seeing those issues dealt with in the setting of World War II is especially interesting, since society at the time wasn't open about such issues.

"I would say it's relevant (to modern veterans)," Honberg says. "The wartime experience is among the most horrendous experiences that people can go through. My dad, who fought in World War II, lost two of his friends right in front of him."

Follow @ msnbc_ent

Honberg notes that although mental-health issues make the news more in 2012 than they did in the film's time, returning soldiers today still struggle with acceptance and treatment issues. And thanks to the different ways wars are fought today, brain injuries are just as much, if not more, of an issue as they were in the past.

"The injuries these days are different," Honberg said. "More soldiers are coming back with concussive injuries, and those are brain injuries."

Although the film is in black and white and is more than 60 years old, it may be more timely now than when it was released back in 1980.

"(In 1980) the film could look more old-fashioned both because of the rough, hand-held cinema verite styles then in fashion for documentaries and because the U.S. had no major wars from which soldiers were returning," said Scott Simmon, a film historian and chair of the English department at University of California, Davis, who wrote an essay about the preservation of the film. "Now the PTSD subject again looks, sadly enough, right up-to-date and documentaries have a wider range of acceptable styles — including such elegant ones as those in Huston’s film."

Film techniques aside, the message of the men and the demons they battle are as affecting today as they were in 1946.

"My own, no doubt hopeful sense is that — now that the film, and especially its sound, has been restored — direct emotions again come through from the psychologically wounded World War II soldiers," Simmon said. "There is something both heartbreaking and yet optimistic about the stories they tell and their recoveries."

Northeast Ohio World War II veterans of 94th Infantry Division, family members working for 'liberator' status

Northeast Ohio World War II veterans of 94th Infantry Division, family members working for 'liberator' status

By Sabrina Eaton

Memories of the gaunt figures that Louis Chulick of Mentor encountered during the 94th Infantry Division's drive across Germany during World War II still haunt the 85-year-old retiree.

Chulick and a group of his fellow riflemen had pulled off the road to eat some K-rations on St. Patrick's Day 1945 when a ragged group of skeletally thin men emerged from a nearby labor camp, surrounded their Army trucks and begged for food.

"It was like something you'd see in a movie," recalls Chulick, a retired principal of Richmond Heights High School. "We gave them rations, and our company commander called to get these people some assistance."

Family members of 94th Division infantry members who aided emaciated Nazi victims at camps they encountered on their way to capturing the Rhine River chemical production center of Ludwigshafen have been trying since 2007 to officially certify the 94th as a division that liberated Nazi concentration camps.

Flags of divisions that are officially certified as "liberators" are displayed at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and in a remembrance ceremony the museum holds each year at the U.S. Capitol. Thirty-five divisions currently have the honor.

Requests for recognition must go through the Army's Center of Military History, which combs through military records to verify the division's liberation role.

So far, efforts to locate the required records for the 94th Division have come up short, but organizers of the drive say they're still hopeful.

Kathleen Cowley of Massachusetts started the effort after hearing her 86-year-old father, Edward, describe how his unit freed inmates of a camp outside Ludwigshafen during World War II.

"I would really like to get this done for them while they are alive to enjoy it," says Cowley, whose father is a retired professor at State University of New York-Albany professor.

She has sought aid from U.S. Sen. John Kerry and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, but to no avail.

She believes that a letter her father wrote home in April 1945 provides evidence that the 94th liberated a concentration camp. The letter says Cowley had seen some of the "atrocities" the Nazis committed, though it doesn't mention a camp or get into graphic details.

"There is nothing kind about the Nazis whatsoever," Cowley wrote at the time. "They've starved their slave labor and lived so well themselves that it's pitiful."

Edward Cowley's best friend, former longtime Hudson resident Thomas Manthey, was part of the unit that entered the forced labor camp with Cowley.

Manthey says its German guards had fled. Some residents were dead. Others were lying in their bunks in wooden shacks. Those in better shape were "just wandering around, kind of in a daze," he recalls. Manthey believes the camp's residents were captives from countries the Germans overran.

Manthey says his unit spent about an hour and a half at the camp, supplying inmates with food and water, until they were ordered to leave because medics were coming.

"It was a sickening scene," said Manthey, a retired Pickands Mather mining company vice president who now lives near Minneapolis. "They were vastly malnourished. How many survived or didn't, we never knew."

Although Chulick, Manthey and Cowley still think about the suffering prisoners they saw nearly 70 years ago, they don't know the names or the exact locations of the camps they encountered as they rushed into battle, or even if the facilities they saw were actual concentration camps.

Experts at the Holocaust Museum say there were thousands of forced labor camps throughout Germany and that many were not officially part of the concentration camp system, which consisted of 30 to 40 main camps and about 1,000 subcamps.
Related stories

That's one reason the effort to certify the 94th Division as "liberators" hasn't been successful.

In addition to running the concentration camp system, the Nazis operated numerous forced labor camps that housed hundreds of thousands of Eastern European civilians who were deported to Germany for labor. They also operated ghettos and prisoner-of-war camps.

Geoffrey Megargee at the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies has been compiling an encyclopedia to document them all. He estimates there were at least 30,000 facilities run by the Nazis. He says that none of the 27 work camps around Ludwigshafen were concentration camps.

Records of the 94th Division's exploits that were reviewed by the U.S. Army Center for Military History found that it encountered a prisoner-of-war camp outside of Baumholder on March 18, the day after Chulick says he was approached by prisoners, as well as a camp containing 270 Eastern European workers outside of Thely that was previously freed by another division. Chulick said he doesn't know whether those were the camps he encountered.
holocaust memorial museum.JPGView full sizeCox News Service file photoThe U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

"One of the big problems with determining who liberated what is that a lot of the American GIs and British soldiers didn't understand what they were liberating," adds Holocaust Memorial Museum historian Peter Black.

Stephen Lofgren, who heads the Historical Support Branch of the U.S. Army Center for Military History, says that an exhaustive search of the 94th Division's official unit records from World War II has not found any contemporary evidence that the unit ever liberated a concentration camp. But plenty of notations show it encountered other types of camps.

"There has been a lot of time and effort invested in trying to find something," says Lofgren. "I didn't create these criteria. They are what they are. I don't like being in the position of saying no, but we are really saying we can't say yes because the criteria have not been met."

Strict procedures were put in place for verifying the military division's "liberator" status to prevent Holocaust deniers from using errors as "proof" that historians fabricated Nazi destruction.

"The reality is, all the divisions should be recognized as liberators," says Lofgren. "Maybe you are the first one to reach a certain camp, but that division doesn't reach that camp without the support and help of all the other soldiers."

Chulick says he's doubtful that anything will happen unless members of the division and their supporters find the needed records. Manthey says he believes the recognition would be deserved, but it "really doesn't make that much difference to me."

"I am going to be 87 soon," says Manthey. "Most of us World War II veterans are gone. I think the families would take comfort in any action that's taken." 

WWII soldier returns to Europe

WWII soldier returns to Europe

By Scott Koperski

The memories faded over the decades, but when Dean Morgan returned to Wingen, France, a small community near the German border, the memories came back.

There was the church where American soldiers were being held.

There was the railroad underpass where he took shelter from fire, and a mere 50 yards away was the house from which the German fire came.

Nearly 70 years had passed since Dean was first in Wingen, but for an American soldier fighting for his life, it seemed like yesterday.

“We went through that eastern underpass and tried to fire our way back into town,” Dean said while looking at a picture of the weathered tunnel. “We had to fight our way back into town, and there was a house where machine guns were preventing everyone from coming out of the tunnel.”

Eventually, reinforcements arrived and the solders escaped the tunnel, took out the enemy fire and liberated the captured Americans.

Reliving the memories was difficult at times, but he didn’t have to do it alone. His family made the trip with him, most notably his grandson Michael, who is stationed on an Army base in Baumholder, Germany.

After uniting with his grandson, three generations of Morgans relived Dean’s experience together.

“We went to Germany to see Mike, but also to take my dad along so he could go back to Wingen,” said Bob Morgan, Dean’s son. “He remembers one of the most vivid battles he was in to free the town and 100 American soldiers that were captured there.”

Dean, now 86, said liberating the townspeople was one of his fondest memories of his time served in Wingen.

“In liberating these towns, the people just loved us,” he recalled. “They’d been under German rule for so long. They really liked to see us. It was really something back then.”

The trip to Wingen wasn’t Dean’s first. He also traveled there in 1978.

“The first time I (returned to) Wingen, this guy stopped us and asked if I was here in World War II,” Dean said. “He asked if I knew that house just outside the underpass. I told him I did, and he said that was one of his guys on the machine gun.

“We both agreed that it was a tough time. We both lost good friends. They were just like us. They didn’t want to fight any more than we did.”

Dean has rehashed his experience at multiple war reunions over the years.

He now harbors no hard feelings to the enemies he fought in World War II, though it took time to make that progress.

“It took a few years, like 25-30 years,” Dean said with a laugh. “I never really talked about it much and I wish now I had; I maybe would remember some more things.”

While the combat in Wingen was a terrifying experience, Dean said the most dangerous part of his tour of duty was the treacherous weather conditions.

“I froze my feet so many times that I couldn’t walk anymore, so I went to the hospital and that was the end of my combat after about 60 days,” Dean said. “I think the weather was really as much an enemy to us as the Germans were.”

With his own military service behind him, Dean reflected on his grandson Mike, a 2007 Beatrice High School graduate.

“I’m really proud of him that he chose to do that himself,” Dean said. “He has really taken to it, so that’s been good for him in the service.”